A recent blog-post by Patheos has inspired much conversation about the Spirit of Poverty and what has been called the ferocious beast of Capitalism. Living in a capitalist society with full awareness is much like having a veil pulled from your eyes. You can see the effects, feel powerless to affect change, remain apathetic towards the passions of others or maybe even experience indifference. To be human, some say, is knowing good & evil. Knowing and Experience are the ways of the wise. The ways of Our craft...

Poverty of the Mind & Body

When one strives towards community, the idea of sharing efforts and achieving a common goal is so often treated as an opposing force against the spirit, that one can fail to launch. Labors can tax the Body and thus drain the Mind. One may favor romanticism over the realities of the material and expectations not met transmute into resentment. There is a longing to shed one's mortal coil while holding on to it steadfast and strong. Ideas are great but if there's no real follow-through, how can anyone expect goals to be reached? There's labor involved and if you get in and get your hands dirty, you're bound to get fruit!

We focus our intent, we hope to use it in a meaningful way that leads to personal fulfillment while also strengthening our community. It can be a balancing act and more often than not, one can fail to reconcile discrepancies between what the spirit wants and the body can do. We appreciate all efforts towards community but not at the cost of Poverty to the Mind & Body. This leads to apathy and so many fall away from it and retreat to solitude. The lens by which one views community can seem as though it was fashioned by Nero himself but there are other ways of seeing, of being in community. Maybe you feel like an accidental tourist but the more you visit a place, the more familiar it can become. It can become a home away from home, an investment in your own future. It can earn interest!

The Pagan

"The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted. We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so."

–Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

The Human SPirit

"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. …All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

–Marx and Engles, The Communist Manifesto

Musings are a way to keep the conversation going, to keep ideas alive that act as the energy to feed action.